2026 Licensing & Certification Curricula (Securities, Cloud, IT, Real Estate, Bar & CPA) are now live
AWS • North America
How we'd study for this one.
Cloud and IT certification exams verify that you can design, secure, and operate workloads on a platform: cloud concepts, architecture, security and compliance, operations, and the core services of the vendor you are certifying on.
The percentages below are our proposal for cloud & it exams: how much study time each topic deserves, not a copy of the official blueprint. Confirm the provider's published outline before you rely on them.
Weight
Topic
What it covers
22proposed
Cloud concepts & value
Cloud
Service models, deployment models, and the economics of cloud computing.
22proposed
Architecture & design
Architecture
High availability, elasticity, scaling, and designing for failure.
24proposed
Security & compliance
Security
Shared responsibility, identity and access, encryption, and compliance boundaries.
18proposed
Operations & monitoring
Operations
Deployments, monitoring, logging, patching, and incident response.
14proposed
Services & pricing
Services
Core services per vendor, pricing models, and cost optimization.
How to pass
Keys to passing.
Learn the shared-responsibility model for the platform you are certifying.
Design for failure: redundancy, health checks, and rollback by default.
Apply least privilege in every identity and access scenario.
Map service names to jobs: compute, storage, database, network, analytics.
Use the vendor's official exam guide and sample questions for exact scope.
How to study
Study tips.
Draw the architecture for each practice scenario before answering.
Keep a one-line cheat sheet comparing IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.
Practice with the vendor's free hands-on tier — lab time beats reading.
Track misses by domain (security, architecture, operations) and drill the weakest.
Go deeper
Deeper reading.
What these tests measure
Cloud certifications sample cloud concepts and value, architecture and design for reliability, security and compliance, operations and monitoring, and the vendor's core services and pricing.
Service and deployment models
High availability and elastic design
Identity, keys, and encryption
Deployment, monitoring, and incident response
How to use this draft package
These field-level questions practice the cross-vendor foundations with full explanations. Confirm the official exam guide, question count, and scoring for your specific certification.
The core prep loop
Answer, check, then write the principle that decided the answer in one line — most cloud scenarios reduce to capacity, control boundary, or cost.
Vendor-specific depth
Each vendor exam adds service names, limits, and pricing details. Pair this package with the official exam guide and hands-on practice on that platform.